Tarnished trade

DIAMONDS, as Marilyn Monroe observed, are a girl's best friend. And in one sense she was quite right: in a fickle world they represent wealth and independence. Warmongers fighting some of Africa's bloodiest conflicts - from Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo to Sierra Leone - would certainly agree. The wealth these precious stones creates has fuelled wars in that continent for years.

The call by Britain to establish an embargo on these 'conflict diamonds' is therefore to be applauded.

It is the bloody fighting in Sierra Leone that has directed the spotlight once again on war diamonds. And once again it is clear that the alternative to such a trade ban is a long and ever more ruinous military struggle.

Diamonds are the reason the murderous leaders of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) can continue their nine-year guerilla campaign in the ravaged country. So long as the RUF controls Sierra Leone's diamond mines, they will have a ready source of income to pay for arms.

The difficulty Britain and other sympathetic countries face lies in the fact that diamonds have two essential attributes: they are extremely valuable and they are easily transported. So it is a sad but inevitable fact that an embargo is unlikely to succeed unless it is married with something much more fundamental than ethics: market forces.

After decades of operating a cartel and a fundamentally unregulated industry, it appears that the world's largest diamond dealer is finally ready to clean up its act. Next month, De Beers - the South African company that controls 70 per cent of the global trade in diamonds - will meet 120 of its major buyers. An announcement of sweeping changes in the way trading takes place is widely predicted to follow.